Afterword: #Illness

Summary

Critiques about the normativity of the idea of narrative self in illness narratives seem to be recycled in recent debates about the employment of social media. Following his wife's Guardian article, American journalist Bill Keller's 2014 column in the New York Times about Lisa Bonchek Adams’ ‘online omnipresence’, her ‘copious’ blogging and tweeting about her metastatic breast cancer, has generated a great deal of negative response by readers who saw it as an attack or at least as a piece lacking in empathy. Bill Keller writes that Adams’ ‘decision to live her cancer onstage invites us to think about it, debate it, learn from it’. His objection seems to be connected to her ‘approach to cancer that honors the warrior’ and denigrates those who do not survive or persevere as long as she does, an objection that many of the narratives I have explored in this book share. Hall, as seen in Chapter 2, confronts discourses of survivorhood and failure within medicine, and her artists’ books reject the cultural narrative of triumph. Similarly, the breast cancer stories and representations examined in Chapter 1 move beyond the simplistic warrior/victim opposition, and so do the portrayals of mental distress in Animated Minds that were discussed in Chapter 6.

Part of the problem with Bill Keller's statement that ‘social media have become a kind of self-medication’ is that such comments betray a generalised damning attitude that does not consider why some people choose these media or what particular aspects of their stories these media might allow them to express. We could determine, for example, as I have tried to do in the previous chapters, the ways these forms (or the mode of narration they allow) are expressive rather than simply providing too much, or merely graphic, information. If we need to attend to what an account communicates in excess of its content – excess read here not as synonymous with exposure that is commonly associated with social media – to respond properly to testimony, should we not respond differently to Adams’ act of copious tweeting, irrespective of whether we agree with the narrative it cultivates?